The present invention relates to system maintenance and diagnosis, and more particularly to techniques for monitoring a system by performing one or more health checks in the system.
Diagnosing defects in systems, such as Oracle database (DB) products, can be a complex and time-consuming task. Several factors may lead to and hinder the progress of accurate diagnosis of defects within such a system. For example, the data collected at the first occurrence of defects in the system is generally not sufficient to diagnose the problem completely. This requires additional collection of diagnostic data and in turn increases the time spent in diagnosing the problem. The data collected may itself lack proper organization and correlation. As a result, it becomes difficult to determine the root cause of the problem and as a result the time required to solve defects increases, thus increasing product down time and adversely affecting customer satisfactions. In addition, some error situations require analysis to be performed immediately or close to the time of defect occurrence so that time-sensitive findings about the errors can be made.
Furthermore, there is presently no mechanism available to pro-actively detect potential defects and to limit or quarantine the damages caused by these potential defects, thus causing significant impact on product availability. Additionally, some defects may require checks and/or analysis to be performed when the product is not fully available yet.